Black Liquor, the title of the latest album from Louisiana cowpunk veterans Dash Rip Rock, sounds like something cool; perhaps a special kind of moonshine that frontman Bill Davis likes to get snockered on.

It’s not.

“We recorded the album in Bogalusa, and a main industry there is the paper mill,” Davis explained.

“Right when we started recording the album, about a year and a half ago, they spilled a lot of junk into the Pearl River, and it’s called black liquor. It’s a byproduct of making paper, just thick, black junk, and they dumped it in the river by mistake – and it killed every fish in the river,” he said. “It went downriver and just wiped out everything. Millions and millions of fish were floating, dead.”

The album is actually rife with environmental politics, delivered in Dash style. The track “Dirt” bemoans the state of the levee system. The title track, of course, addresses Pearl River pollution: “Fast as a thought, sleek as a fox, they laid her in the ground in a white pine box/ her mama had no idea what they were drinking.”

Davis may be getting more lyrically pensive in his middle age, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he's calmed down across the board.

“For me, the new record is sort of my aversion to succumbing to the Americana drudgery of maturity – people my age playing slower, quieter, and all that,” he said.

“Someday I probably will launch that solo career with the acoustic guitar, but not yet.”

In the mid-80’s, Dash Rip Rock joined a burgeoning Southern movement of independent bands that blended supercharged roots music with punk attitude and energy: Jason and the Scorchers, the LeRoi Brothers, Rank and File and even the Cramps – with whom Dash toured, in 1993 - were among their contemporaries and influences.

“We were super obnoxious, we were super-snotty punk rock, and I’m still kind of mending all the damage that it did. You know, sorry about that,” Davis laughed.

The sarcastic "Let's Go Smoke Some Pot" gave Dash Rip Rock a radio hit in the 90's.

“But I think about performers like Jerry Lee Lewis, or Little Richard or someone like that and just imagine the heinous things they did when they were young and never went back and apologized for. I always wished there could have been a Southern Sex Pistols, or a Southern Ramones, and that would’ve been the band I wanted to be in. No apologies - we’re Jerry Lee Lewis, but we’re also Johnny Rotten. That’s kind of what I wanted Dash to be. I think we were that, for a little while.”

In keeping with the band’s 20-year catalog, Black Liquor (Alternative Tentacles) serves up an explosive splat of springy, punk-damaged Southern rock rife with hard, crunchy guitar riffs and snotty vocal swagger. If that sounds like classic DRR, it’s because some of it is - Davis has nearly a hundred cassettes knocking around his house, holding four-track demo versions of songs dating back to the band’s earliest days. When the band decided to record Black Liquor at producer Ben Mumphrey’s Studio In The Country, Davis forwarded along a few tracks from his personal crypt. Mumphrey selected three he thought would work, along with new material.

It turned out that Mumphrey, in Davis’ estimation, was exactly the right person to make the album. He liked what the producer had done with R. Scully and the Rough 7’s raggedy roots-rock n' soul album Give Up Your Dreams, from 2010; he also liked that Mumphrey came to the project with a longstanding knowledge of his band.

“He was a kid, you know, sneaking into Jimmy’s in the 80’s,” Davis said. “He came into it knowing what we’ve done over the past 20 years.”

“He knows the band well, so he was able to thumbs-down some songs he didn’t feel fit into what we were trying to do with this new record, and sort of promote what he knew we were capable of, based on what we’ve done through the years.”

The band plays "Voodoo Doll", from Black Liquor, at the Voodoo Experience 2012.

Through those years, Dash Rip Rock has had its ups and downs. There’ve been lineup changes and label switches; for one album, 2002’s Sonic Boom, the band shortened its name to Dash. For a period of about six years, when Davis left Louisiana for Nashville, the project “lost traction,” he said.

“Dash has come in and out of my life. But I never felt like it ran its course, or it’s gotten old. I’m lucky that people like Ben pop up at this stage in my career to sort of breathe new life into it. Because you know, Dash has been kind of a hit and miss, sketchy band,” Davis said good-naturedly.

“And I feel what (Mumphrey) was able to do was kind of pull out some of our best moments, and he recreated them.”

Next up, Davis said, is a late-2013 vinyl release of a live recording, which features Alternative Tentacles label founder and punk icon Jello Biafra fronting an expanded version of the band, which called itself the Raunch n’Soul All-Stars. At the 12 Bar on Fulton St. during Jazz Fest 2011, the group played a New Orleans-themed set including versions of “House of The Rising Sun,” a song or two by the late Alex Chilton, and John Fred and his Playboy Band’s “Judy In Disguise.”

“Actually, I was listening to some of the recordings the other night, and realized that some of the guys who said they were sax players weren’t really sax players. At one point you hear Jello say, saxophone! And you hear this sort of mrrrwwonk. Afterward I asked around, was that guy really a sax player? And people were like, no! I guess they just wanted to be in the band.”

Dash Rip Rock are also fun and entertaining, and not terrible; good-terrible, or otherwise. The band celebrates the release of Black Liquor, its 17th album, Saturday, December 15 at Siberia (2227 St. Claude Ave.) Show at 10 p.m., tickets $7. The equally legendary old punks King Louie and Rik Slave, the latter with his new band the Cons and Prose, share the bill.